“I should have prayed to the ancestors for luck”

Zoe Wong

“You’re a Good Chinese Girl’ is the phrase my Aunty says to me as I scrub the graves of my grandparents. But I’m not a good Chinese girl. I am not even fully Chinese.”

The complex identifications of East and West that engulf a person who is half Chinese and half Australian are immense. The Disney film Mulan (1998) represents both a small fragment and a huge portion of this complexity. Growing up, the character Mulan quickly became my Chinese idol, and yet ironically she was created by white America. As an autobiographical work You’re a Good Chinese Girl is about being raised in a Western society amidst pop-culture representations of Chinese culture. As a political work, it critically reflects on the binaries we still live by – East/West, Male/Female, Asian/Caucasian. This work is about the bizarre floating space where you are neither one nor the other and yet at the same, a perfect blend of both.

This work is from the You’re a good Chinese girl series.

Zoe Wong

Zoe Wong is a Sydney based, multi-media artist. Her practice explores representation of race and culture within media and its impact on identity. Through appropriation, Zoe critiques cultural stereotypes and addresses the lack of diverse representation.

Growing up half Chinese, half Australian, Zoe’s works often explore identity complexities specific to mixed race people and seeks to create an alternate representation for bi/multi racial people through contemporary art. Having felt a distinct lack of discourse surrounding these issues, Zoe is interested in provoking dialogue in which individual narratives may be expressed. Zoe has recently graduated from a Bachelor (Honours) at UTS in photography.